Multilib Middle-Ground

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 13:59 -0400, Warren Togami wrote:
> seth vidal wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 13:44 -0400, Warren Togami wrote:
> >> seth vidal wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 12:33 -0400, Warren Togami wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> This avoids the lose of:
> >>>> - expecting the user to manually install a complicated set of 
> >>>> arch-specific packages because they can't use yum groupinstall
> >>>
> >>> I think you're overestimating how many folks think this is a big deal.
> >>>
> >> Chinese users?
> >> Indian users?
> >>
> >> Is this really an overestimation?
> > 
> > but it's not ALL chinese or indian users.
> > 
> > it's a subset who happen to need i386 pkgs and who happen to have  an
> > x86_64 box.
> > 
> > And then above that it's the subset of users who cannot figure out how
> > to cut and paste the command they need from a faq.
> > 
> > -sv
> 
> This is "making stuff just work" vs. "eliminate all i386".
> 
> We are a making a serious mistake here catering to the MINORITY of users 
> who want the latter.

Warren,
 Please cut the drama. You make it sound like we just decided to ignore
the icebergs. I really don't see it as that big of a deal. We currently
have no way of magically distinguishing pkgs where we do want the i386
and pkgs where we don't.

As Bill said - the whitelist is just pain to maintain. So, if we want
something like this then we make it a tag at the rpm level. Heck, you
can have it be a rather innocuous provides that we could hack into yum
to look for:

Provides: look-for-i386-too

-sv